Editor Shuffle at Cosmo, Glamour
Time, Newsweek, U. S. News & World Report and other leading media took great interest last month in the departure of Tina Brown as editor of the New Yorker and the naming days later of staff writer David Remnick as her successor. The New York Times played Brown’s announcement above the fold on Page 1. Charlie Rose, the PBS talk host, convened a panel to discuss her exit as if it were a crisis of state.
The New Yorker occupies a rare and influential position at the intersection of news, literature and pop culture. However, despite a comparable amount of media attention, changes announced at Glamour and Cosmopolitan this week will affect far more readers, and are far more significant for the owners of the magazines, because unlike the financially challenged New Yorker, these publications are enormously profitable.
At Glamour, a long era is ending as Ruth Whitney, editor in chief for 31 years, plans to retire. Whitney increased circulation by 1 million copies during her reign (to 2.1 million in the fall), helped turn Glamour into the cash cow of Conde Nast’s marginally profitable group of magazines and won two prestigious National Magazine Awards for Glamour’s enterprising series on abortion and managed care.
Whitney turned 70 last month, but clearly she is not retiring at her happiest. When Conde Nast Chairman S. I. Newhouse Jr. gathered the magazine’s staff Monday to break the news, she was conspicuously absent from his side.
Part of Whitney’s chagrin has to do with Newhouse’s choice of Bonnie Fuller, editor in chief of the saucier Cosmopolitan, as her successor.
Fuller, 41, has done wonders for the bottom line at each of the three magazines she has edited. At YM, once a floundering teen mag, she more than doubled circulation, to 1.8 million, in five years. Joining Hearst Magazines in 1994, she launched the company’s U. S. edition of Marie Claire a year later and made it an instant hit with readers. (Circulation is now 702,000.)
As a result, when Hearst finally decided to accelerate the departure of Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmopolitan’s longtime editor in chief and the widely known force behind the “Cosmo Girl,” the company turned to Fuller. After a year as Brown’s deputy editor, Fuller put out her first issue of Cosmo in February 1997 and went on to grow circulation dramatically and quickly as she increased beauty and fashion coverage, and became more daring and direct with the magazine’s sexual advice.
The latter change was noticeable with Fuller’s first issue. The lead cover line was “His & Her Orgasms: How to Slow Him Down and Speed You Up.” In the new September issue, the lead is “Ecstasy-Sex Exclusive!,” which points to an illustrated roundup of “15 New Sex Positions We Highly Recommend You Test-Drive Immediately.”
Cosmo’s circulation increased to 2.7 million in the second half of last year, growing 8.7% over the same period in 1996. One lucrative element of the overall gain--and what surely impressed Newhouse and company: It reflected a 16.5% rise in full-price newsstand sales.
Indeed, in Fortune’s recent investigative profile of Conde Nast and its sagging finances, the first quote lifted from the text to illustrate the article said: “Cosmopolitan, the Hearst monthly, makes nearly as much money as all of Conde Nast put together.” The magazine’s revenue last year totaled $278.6 million, according to Advertising Age.
“I can say two things,” Newhouse said this week. “Glamour is Glamour and it is not going to change fundamentally. . . . It’s got a loyal readership because they want what they read in Glamour. But every editor, especially a smart editor like Bonnie Fuller, brings--I don’t know--a change of emphasis. When we hire an editor, we don’t require any tabula rasa, as it were. So it remains to be seen how the magazine will change.”
Fuller was so caught up in the whirl generated by Monday’s announcement from Newhouse that she was surprised to learn from this writer that Hearst was saying she would be succeeded immediately at Cosmo by Kate White, 46, editor in chief of the Hearst-owned Redbook and author of the recent “Nine Secrets of Women Who Get Everything They Want” (Harmony).
Praising Glamour and Whitney, Fuller added: “I look forward to evolving the magazine, but I’m going to have to think about what I will do. It’s too soon to talk about it now.”
Asked to identify the differences between the two magazines, Fuller said: “I think Glamour is a broader, more general-interest magazine for working women than Cosmo is. Glamour is plugged into the concerns of young women, and it’s on top of the issues, but it has what I would call a broader format than Cosmo.
“Cosmo, on the other hand, has incredible strengths in the areas of relationships and sexual issues. And I certainly worked on building other areas of the magazine, too.”
Syndicated industry research from the spring of 1997 shows a striking similarity in the age of the two audiences: The median age of Cosmo’s readership is 32.4; Glamour’s is 31.3. (Redbook has an audience with a median age of 41.2.)
Roberta Garfinkle, senior vice president and director of print media at the ad agency McCann-Erickson New York, characterized the hiring of Fuller as a coup for Conde Nast, given the competition between Glamour and Cosmo. “My scenario is that Bonnie will do to Glamour what she did to Cosmo--not change it, but tweak and improve the existing product,” Garfinkle said. “And if Hearst is smart, I don’t think they’ll do much to Cosmo. After all, it’s going gangbusters. Why mess it up?”
White, the new Cosmo editor, has been editor of Redbook for four years and previously was editor in chief of McCall’s, Child and Working Woman. Like many other successful women in magazine publishing, White got her start working for Whitney, as an editorial assistant.
Redbook’s new September issue features Kathie Lee Gifford on the cover, which blurbs a story on how the entertainer survived “the worst betrayal a wife can face,” and a “Love + Sex Guide” that is unrelated to husband Frank Gifford’s off-the-field adventures.
The 2.9-million-circulation Redbook, one of the leading women’s service magazines collectively known as the “Seven Sisters,” will be led for the interim by acting editor in chief Ellen Kunes. She has held the No. 2 job of executive editor under White.
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Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.
